Mrs. Obama grew up on the South Side of Chicago but later went on to study sociology and African-American studies at Princeton University. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, she joined the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin.

As the first African-American first lady this country has seen, Mrs. Obama has won the American public over with her warm smile, elegance, poise and intelligence. While President Obama has had a tough time tackling such issues as healthcare reform, high unemployment rates, and multiple wars abroad, Mrs. Obama isn’t simply sitting on the sidelines but she has taken on a few causes of her own.

Over the past four decades, obesity rates have soared among American children of all age groups, increasing nearly five-fold among those ages 6-11. Today, nearly 25 million children are overweight or obese. Some experts believe that if obesity among children continues to increase, our current generation of children will become the first in American history to live shorter lives than their parents.

Mrs. Obama has taken on the cause of fighting childhood obesity through her initiative, Let’s Move! The program, launched in February 2010, is a comprehensive initiative, dedicated to solving the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation. Combining comprehensive strategies with common sense, Let’s Move! is about putting children on the path to a healthy future during their earliest months and years, giving parents helpful information and fostering environments that support healthy choices.

“The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake,” said Mrs. Obama. “By investing in even one grocery store you might be able to revitalize just one neighborhood. By building more sidewalks [today] you can reduce health costs and budget strain tomorrow.”

Let’s Move puts a particular focus on providing healthier foods in our schools, ensuring that every family has access to healthy, affordable food and helping kids become more physically active.

In addition to tackling childhood obesity the first lady is turning her attention toward military families by launching a program to ensure U.S. troops and their loved ones have the support they need.

The initiative “Joining Forces,” is aimed at shoring up military families in a range of areas, including education, employment and wellness.

Mrs. Obama said the initiative will include a public-awareness campaign, additional help for children of troops and veterans and partnerships with some of the country’s biggest employers, who have agreed to redouble their efforts to hire veterans and their spouses.

“This campaign is about all of us, all of us joining together, as Americans, to give back to the extraordinary military families who serve and sacrifice so much, every day, so that we can live in freedom and security,” she said. “Joining Forces is a challenge to every segment of American society to take action, to make a real commitment to supporting and engaging these families.”

With no guarantee that President Obama will win reelection in 2012 Michelle Obama has already made history and become an iconic figure in American history. She is an American mother, wife, attorney, public servant and our FIRST LADY.

During his speech the president advanced several positive initiatives including extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment benefits for the chronically unemployed. His $450 billion jobs program is a significant deposit on the scope and size of the economic and jobs problem our country currently faces.

With employment growth for women lagging behind that of their male counterparts and with nearly two-thirds of women being breadwinners or co-breadwinners for their families, the Obama Administration touts that the plan they set forth last week will have a significant impact on women.

Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor for President Obama, emphasized the following points to drive home how the American Jobs Act will benefit women in particular.

Preventing up to 280,000 teacher layoffs – keeping teachers in the classroom:

The President’s plan will invest $30 billion to help prevent up to 280,000 teacher layoffs, along. If these layoffs were to occur, they would disproportionately impact women, who make up about 78% of pre-K- to 12 teachers.

An extension of unemployment insurance that will prevent 2.6 million women from losing their benefits:

The President is calling for an extension of unemployment insurance, which would prevent some of the 2.6 million American women who are currently receiving unemployment benefits from losing a crucial lifeline. This extension would be paired with reforms to help the program better serve the long-term unemployed – including the 2.8 million women who have been unemployed longer than six months.

Supporting job training and successful subsidized employment approaches:

The President’s plan would create a new Pathways Back to Work Initiative that would support successful subsidized employment programs and work-based job training that builds skills and connect participants to work. This Initiative could provide job opportunities and vital work-based training to hundreds of thousands of low-income women, many of whom are single mothers.

Over 75 million women will benefit from the extension of the payroll tax cut:

By extending the payroll tax cut next year, the President’s plan will help increase the paychecks of 77.9 million women in the workforce – providing them with more money to support their families and spend in their communities.

Too many Americans have lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings as a direct result of the greed of the privileged few.  As it stands over 14 million people are unemployed, 8.8 million people underemployed and poverty is expanding. The President outlined a bold and hopeful plan for the future.  It’s time for Congress to show up and act.

Disenfranchisement tactics such as voter ID proposals threaten decades of work by African-Americans and other racial minorities to run for and win elected office yielding major gains in civic participation and representation. The right to vote, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, youth, the elderly and people with disabilities, is under assault.

Measures requiring stringent voter identification, proof of citizenship for registration, and cutbacks to early voting, eliminating same day, on-site voter registration, have been or are being pushed in 38 states.

Proponents of voter ID laws have long claimed that such restrictions are necessary in order to protect against phantom voter fraud schemes. Reality has never been an underpinning of these arguments.  Such initiatives are harmful to our democracy and will result in restricting and reducing – rather than expanding – access to voting, and the percentage of our population that will cast votes in elections.

Earlier this year Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into law legislation that will make it more difficult for students, seniors and minority residents to register, vote, and then have their ballots counted.

The law now forces more Florida residents to cast provisional ballots which are not likely to be counted, limits the number of days Floridians have access to the polls–cutting early voting days from 14 days to eight days and eliminating early voting on the Sunday before Election Day–and has effectively shut down the volunteer voting registration work of organizations like the League of Women Voters and the Boy Scouts.

“The fundamental right to vote has been crucial in the struggle to achieve racial equality,” said Lawyers’ Committee Executive Director Barbara R. Arnwine.  “Lawmakers should not play partisan games by severely restricting a right that so many Americans have fought and died to secure.  My hope is that we can come together as a nation to further expand access to our great democracy and encourage full participation in our elections.”

More and more states are enacting burdensome voter photo ID bills using general, unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and ignoring the disparate impact upon voters who have traditionally been disadvantaged, including minorities, the elderly, youth, low-income Americans and those with disabilities.

The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy.  Disenfranchising legislation, combined with budget cuts, and voter intimidation tactics, could create a recipe for mass disenfranchisement in the 2012 election. As the 2012 elections approach it is more important than ever that all citizens have equal access to the ballot box.

As a member of the Illinois Reform Commission, I helped cook up some ethics reform in the aftermath of Governor Rod Blagojevich’s arrest in December 2008.

We passed the first-ever caps on campaign contributions in Illinois and stronger freedom of information laws. But many of our recommendations were too disruptive to politics as usual, and shelved.

With Blagojevich set for sentencing in October on 17 criminal counts of corruption, now is time to renew our efforts at ethics reform.

The place to start is with the pocketbooks of our political leaders. If you hold elected office or make decisions on where tax dollars are spent, you should be required by law to report your sources of income.

That means your government salary and money from other jobs, government contracts, rental properties and market investments.

Citizens need real information to judge for themselves if elected officials are serving the public interest, or self interest. The ways our laws are written now, the public cannot tell.

The second step is to make sure the information is easy for people to find. It should go online in a searchable database like the one that Cook County Clerk David Orr launched this summer, and be available at no cost to watchdog groups and taxpayers alike.

Critics say this would scare too many people away from public service — that you shouldn’t hold the dog catcher, the school board member and the governor to the same standard of scrutiny.

In Illinois, we have no shortage of people looking for government work or running for office. And if we scare off a few ethically skittish candidates, so be it.

Citizens should know if their dog catcher is a double dipper, if their school board member is a textbook consultant, and — as we learned in our most recent courtroom drama — if the governor has income from people wanting to do business with the state.

Honest and open government should be a given for hardworking taxpayers anywhere in our country.

Unfortunately for us in Illinois, where two out of our last three governors have been convicted of corruption charges in federal court, the public does not live with that expectation.

We have come to expect too little.

In the post-Blagojevich and post-Ryan era, we must demand more from our leaders. When we face difficult budgets and tough choices about how to use scarce tax dollars, we ought to expect fair dealing.

When I was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor in January, I pledged to make government more accountable, accessible and transparent.

Within 10 days of taking my oath of office, I released a personal financial statement showing my husband’s and my net worth.

Three months later, my senior staff provided public financial disclosure, beyond what is required by law.

These are easy steps to earn the public’s trust that we will provide honest services.

That’s why I’m working with the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and Legislative Inspector General Thomas Homer to apply similar public disclosures to other elected officials.

A jury decided this summer that former Gov. Blagojevich deserved a guilty sentence.

Now, with his sentencing coming this fall, we need to decide that we deserve better. We deserve regular access to detailed financial records of our elected officials.

Let’s cook our turkeys in the kitchen, not in the courthouse.

Sheila Simon is the Illinois Lieutenant Governor and a former member of the Southern Illinois University School of Law faculty. A slightly altered version of this blog post appeared in the Chicago-Sun Times and Huffington Post.

Women typically take the lead in maintaining the health of their families: scheduling regular check-ups for their children, making sure their husbands and children eat properly and caring for elderly parents. So it’s imperative that they themselves have access to quality healthcare and resources.

Earlier this year officials for NARAL Pro-Choice America expressed that none of the current GOP presidential candidates would be beneficial to women’s reproductive health.

In addition to stating that they are against abortion rights, most of the Republican and Tea Party contenders have gone on record stating they’re in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood. Some of them have also voted against or been vocally opposed to any kind of federal funding for contraception.

“We can’t afford to give up the good fight until the day Roe v. Wade is nothing but a shameful footnote in our nation’s history books,” Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) stated.

Six candidates have signed a pledge from Susan B. Anthony List that states they will nominate only anti-abortion candidates to judgeships and top executive branch positions, as well as defund Planned Parenthood and other recipients of federal funding that provide abortion care.

Earlier this year former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said, “”I can’t imagine any other organization with its roots as poisonous as the roots of Planned Parenthood getting federal funding of any kind.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former pizza executive Herman Cain declined to sign the pledge, while former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman also said he would not sign it or any other pledge.

Romney’s position on abortion and other women’s health issues switched from pro-choice to anti-choice during his term as governor from 2003 to 2007, and his record on choice-related issues is mixed. He vetoed a measure that would have allowed pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription to rape victims, but he signed into law a measure to expand family planning services for low-income women and families in Massachusetts.

Huntsman is anti-choice but has supported some family planning-friendly legislation.

As governor, he signed a bill that banned second-trimester abortions and another that would trigger a full ban on abortions if Roe v. Wade were ever overturned. He also signed a bill that penalizes unmarried couples by taking away social services for their children.

On Monday, Sept. 12th, CNN will broadcast the “Tea Party Republican Debate,” live from Tampa, Florida at 8 p.m. ET. Watch for yourself.

“I woke up one morning and thought, I don’t want to be a career politician,” Garrett told the Lake Forester.  “I’ve done a lot, I’ve worked hard — it’s probably a good time for me to move on.”

While we will sincerely miss her service in the Illinois General Assembly, we agree that she has done a lot during her years of service.

Garrett began her journey in Illinois politics in 1998 when she was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives.  In 2002, she was elected state senator and earned re-election twice.

Throughout her political career Garrett placed an emphasis on quality-of-life issues particularly, accessible health care, quality education, well-planned communities, and economic development.  She also made it a priority to be accessible to her constituents.  You could always find her at town hall meetings, parades and supporting other candidates running for office when she wasn’t in Springfield.

Garrett has often been described as thoughtful and open-minded and when asked about her legacy she stated, “I’ve got relationships with Democrats and Republicans. I’m able to work in a very bipartisan way. It’s always been important to me that I won’t become a partisan politician. Because of that, I think that I’ve been able to be more effective. I think that’s my legacy.”

With a little over a year left in her term, Garrett continues to work to improve the lives of Illinois residents.  On August 24, 2011, Governor Quinn signed House Bill 248–sponsored by Rep. Karen May and Sen. Susan Garrett—into law.  The law allows the North Shore Sanitary District to supply sustainable, environmentally-friendly treated wastewater to identified partners. The recycled wastewater will save large volumes of treated drinking water.

This is just the most recent piece of legislation that Garrett has passed. She has passed everything from government and ethics reform to legislation to improve education, the environment and improved services to people with developmental disabilities. She has been a leader in so many parts of our lives and Illinois government that we are sad to see her go. Take a moment to look at some of her bills that are now Illinois law.

Her service has been remarkable. We thank her for everything she has done and look forward to seeing what she is up to next.

By the way, she is receiving the Mikva Political Courage Award at the Tenth Dems’ Annual Fundraiser on September 18. Click here to buy your ticket today!

Elected officials, candidates and ardent Democrats turned out to listen to our state-wide officials, including the ever popular Secretary of State Jesse White who announced his intention to run for a fourth term.  Attorney General Lisa Madigan reminded everyone why she has been the most popular Illinois Attorney General when she spoke about the importance of advocating for the less fortunate.  Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon told the audience about her continued work in education reform and invited everyone to stop by and listen to her playing at the State Fair. Focusing on his affinity and commitment to our military, Gov. Pat Quinn honored our veterans and spoke about key legislation from the past year.  He introduced his friend and keynote speaker, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who gave a stirring and powerful speech about the importance of healthcare in the United States.  Schweitzer reminded all of us why 2012 will be crucial to the re-election of President Barack Obama, as well as trying to take back control of the House of Representatives.

Board members and regional chairs of Illinois Democratic Women joined the other 2000 plus Democrats in enthusiastically supporting the Democratic Party.  Attending were former IDW President Susan Shea, 1^st VP Jamie Crain, 2^nd VP Laura Fletcher, State Regional Chair Kim Savage and Co-President Pam Monetti.  We also had several regional chairs at our table including Jackie Traynere, Chris Winick and Marlo Barnett.  After the Brunch, several members headed to the State Fair to set up a table to recruit new members.  Democrat Day on the Director’s Lawn at the Illinois State Fairgrounds gave participants the opportunity to listen to the speakers, an opportunity to see old friends and make new friends as we all discussed today’s political environment.  The day ended with a fundraiser for Gov. Quinn with Gov. Schweitzer taking the time to pose for pictures and talk to Illinois Democrats.